Trump is wrong on climate change

President Donald Trump believes that withdrawing from the Paris climate change deal will mean great things for the American economy. He's wrong.

Meanwhile, the planet grows warmer. This international agreement is about the planet, after all.

Trump thinks of himself as the president who creates jobs and looks out for America's interests. He seized on the U.N.-brokered Paris agreement to combat global warming as an impediment to both of those aims:

•Trump wants to revive the energy business (specifically: coal), but coal spews pollutants into the air that cause global warming. Trump is fixated on the idea that coal mining jobs will spring from the ground after he pulls the U.S. out of Paris deal. They won't.

•He also looks skeptically at international agreements because he thinks they weaken the United States. In the president's view, the global warming agreement forces onerous environmental restrictions on the U.S. economy while allowing other countries to skirt by with lesser promises.

Here's why he's wrong: Coal is not the future of energy. Green technology is the future, and natural gas, which is cleaner and cheaper than coal, is the present. As for doing international deals, sometimes they just make sense.

The biggest weakness in Trump's argument is that he's overlooking the main purpose of the Paris agreement: to protect the world from environmental catastrophe. There is a scientific consensus that global warming is a man-made threat to Earth, its habitats and its people. The climate is changing, seas are rising and the ice caps are shrinking. Habitats are at risk, and the main cause is greenhouse gas emissions.

The Paris deal, adopted in late 2015, represented the first time the world's governments agreed they all have a responsibility to limit pollution spewing from power generating stations, vehicles and other sources. Previous negotiations to clean up the atmosphere failed to persuade developing nations to sign on.

This accord spelled out voluntary commitments to reduce carbon emissions, with the long-range goal of preventing Earth from overheating to a point where it might not recover. Countries offered up what they thought they could achieve. The U.S., the world's most advanced economy, pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. China, the world's biggest carbon polluter, said it would cap emissions by 2030. Experts, however, believe China's emissions decline will begin much sooner.

Trump's zero-sum game perspective on the deal isn't useful. Because China made a different climate commitment, he thinks it means the U.S. lost a negotiation. But countries like China and India are far behind the U.S. economically and can't match its ability to invest in clean technology. India still has more than 200 million people living without electricity. The significance of the Paris accord is that China and India took seats at the table because they recognized they must stop poisoning the air of their own cities.

The role of the U.S. should be as a leader, pushing and coaxing other countries to do as much as possible to clean up the atmosphere everyone shares. Otherwise the risk grows of other nations backsliding on commitments. But Trump doesn't appear to take the threat of climate change seriously. He didn't sound at all concerned about the fate of the planet Thursday when he announced his decision to leave the agreement.

Trump's stubborn approach represents a squandered opportunity to assert American influence, ceding the conversation to Europe and China. This puts the U.S. on the sidelines for one of the most important issues of our time. That's a risky place to be. It's also a deeply puzzling position for a president so focused on business: A lot of those conversations will be about the future of green energy, meaning solar, wind and other technologies at which the U.S. excels.

Coal is not the future. The electric car is the future. Sustainable power is the future. Staying in the Paris agreement would assure the U.S. a major role in developing and profiting from cleaner energy. Instead other countries have the incentive to do so. If Trump wants to talk about the impact of the Paris deal on jobs, he shouldn't be talking about coal mines.